Bob Young, Chairman of the Board for Red Hat has written an open letter to the Community, in response to some of the recent criticism of Red Hat 7. If you've been following these stories at all, or the Linux scene, this is worth checking out.

Herz writes: "I got this email today from Red Hat. RH7 will crash out of the box in 3 weeks! The new Update Agent provided with Red Hat Linux 7.0 contains a daemon, rhnsd, which periodically polls Red Hat Network for updates. This daemon leaks file descriptors. On a default installation, all available file descriptors will be used by rhnsd in approximately three weeks, making the system unusable." The Red Hat folks have also provided a fix, though -- updated packages for those who want to use their update network, and the two-line method of disabling per machine for those who don't. After all, everyone wants uptime > 3 weeks, eh? And you don't need to wait for a "service pack," either.

mrsam writes: "I was one of the many people who, about a year ago, was picked for Red Hat's directed share program in their IPO. Soon thereafter the underwriter, E*Trade, kicked me out of the program without giving a good reason. Believing my dismissal to be completely unjustified and without merit, I filed a claim against E*Trade pursuant to NASD arbitration rules. For all practical matters, I sued them. A NASD arbitration claim is basically an expedited lawsuit. I am pleased to report that I have won my claim. I won damages AND legal fees. I have put up the arbitration panel's decision, plus some juicy stuff that my legal eagles have obtained during the discovery process, at http://www.geocities.com/~mrsam/etrouble/hearing.html. The whole story, from start to finish, is at http://www.geocities.com/~mrsam/etrouble/."

John E. Cosgrove writes "I read in this article that IBM signed a deal with Red Hat to include RedHat linux on all of their mainframe servers. It's a little short, but worth the look."

theridersofrohirrim writes "Linuxtoday has a very interesting summary and some interviews with redhat staff, regarding redhat 7, gcc 2.96, and more. It also includes some embarassing (but justified in my opinion) comments for Slashdot's redhat 7 bug story. Linuxtoday's article can be found their site."

langed writes: "It appears that Jeff Dike has supplied a new implementation of the Linux kernel, whereby it is possible to boot a Linux kernel from the command line. This allows you to test a kernel before installing it, or completely partition users off from the main system. Networking appears to be through a slip connection, AFAIK, but this thing shows serious potential for increasing security and for kernel hacking, among many other nifty uses."

rafa asks: "Red Hat has recently upgraded their RPM system from the 3.x to 4.0 in the the Red Hat 7.0 distribution. The RPM Web site hasn't been upgraded since sometime in 1999. What has changed since RPM 3? What improvements have been made, and why did they chose to break compatability?"

Scooter[AMMO] was one of the first with this report: "According to Turbolinux CEO Paul Thomas, the future will see Linux boiled down to one generic distribution. Catch the scoop here. How can this claim be made? How can a system like Debian throw away all its guidelines to create a generic distribution? I won't give up apt, and I sure don't see RH accepting it. Why should Peter let the uber-stable power user-oriented Slackware head towards the bug infested hail-the-script-kiddies Red Hat? Standards are great, but aren't the ideals of different distributions what give Linux its flavour?"

The GCC Steering Committee has issued a statement on the use of snapshots in distributions. This statement is clearly in response to Red Hat's use of gcc-2.96 in its Red Hat 7 release. They didn't like it very much, and there are compatibility problems. Worth a read. Credits for this news goes to Linux Weekly News.

startingInUnix asks: "I went to my college career fair today looking for a summer internships. Alot of the companies there (and on the web) that have internships are mostly Microsoft camps. I'm having trouble finding any place that offers UNIX positions. Does anyone out there have a business that looks for UNIX interns?"

cnkeller writes with this snippet from an article in InfoWorld: "BERLIN -- THE much-anticipated 2.4 version of the Linux kernel will take at least another two months to complete, Linus Torvalds, creator of the open-source operating system, said here Friday. 'It's been a slower process than many people would like,' he said, remarking that developers are no longer adding new features, only fixing bugs. 'With luck, we'll see it in early December, and with not so good luck, I still hope that we can do it this side of the year.'"

solusthewizard writes: "SuSE, probably Europe's top Linux distro, is available for download as a 'live evaluation' iso image for version 7.0. Not quite sure what that means as opposed to the shrinkwrapped version as I haven't finished downloading it yet! Check out here for the iso (or better still, look for a local mirror). Can't be any worse than Red Hat 7.0, my laptop is still recovering." Read about the things that make 7.0 beam with pride here, if you'd like. I will make a sizeable contribution to The Human Fund in the name of everyone who establishes or points to a mirror :)

Euro was the first to point out: "I happened to browse the Opera Web site and discovered this juicy nugget: Opera 4.0b1 for Linux is available for download. Seems like the Linux browser front is getting better all the time." Well, sure. But it's been a long, long, long, long, long, long, long time.

ArsonSmith writes: "It seems that at primates.helixcode.com they have been able to get Debian GNU/Linux up and running on the Compaq iPaq PocketPC. This seems to be the first main distribution to be running on a handheld." The Debian Way may sometimes seem ponderous and conservative, but obviously that's not always the case. How'd you like to be able to apt-get new apps on your PDA? This is a detailed description which should interest anyone lucky enough to have one of these cuties.

carrier lost asks: "I have to connect to my company's VPN using L2TP. I am masquerading my company-provided Windows boxes behind Linux 2.2.16. I have successfully configured the combination to provide PPTP, but now I have to figure out how to enable L2TP. Has anyone done this? Can you point me to a step-by-step tutorial?"

thrillbert writes: "According to this article, Red Hat is claiming to be the starter of the open-source movement." The article talks about several companies in the area (include the one that owns this site). I don't have the heart to comment on this. I can't say I'm surprised, but I'd tend to think a lot of others might deserve more credit. RMS (sure he'd hate the term Open Source, but he deserves credit). ESR will just take the credit.(Update:Its a joke! I was kidding! Stop flaming!) But Linus isn't even mentioned. I mean, Michael Tiemann and Red Hat deserve lots of credit for helping make Linux mainstream, but starting it?

TBHiX writes "Apparently, according to reports on bugzilla and on linuxnewbie.internet.com, Red Hat 7.0 is being described by some people as one of the buggiest distros they've seen in recent history." Red Hat's point-oh releases have been historically been pretty bad over the years, so I the only thing that surprises me is that people didn't realize it before they downloaded it. The point release has typically been fine, but the bugzilla report lists over a thousand bugs: 200 appearing this week. Take this as a warning folks: didn't 4.0, 5.0 and 6.0 teach you anything? *grin* But a DB with 2500 bugs in it doesn't necessarily mean a buggy distribution either.

Mike Dubreuil writes: "When I went to download Red Hat Linux 7.0 for Sparc I was disappointed to learn RH is dropping support for the sparc processor line. They are claiming that there is a low demand for sparc versions This may be a major blow to the Linux community because Red Hat is the top vendor for commercial copies of Linux. Not to mention that they have the support in place to handle what large companies demand." Update: 10/02 09:43 PM by CT : Bernhard Rosenkraenz wrote in to say "It is true that we will probably not release Red Hat Linux 7.0 for sparc. However, this does NOT mean there won't be a Red Hat Linux 7.1 or 7.2 for sparc. If, at some time, we decide to discontinue commercial sparc support, we will turn Red Hat Linux for sparc into a community effort."

A curious Anonymous Coward wrote in with this important issue: "RedHat Linux 7.0 does not include libc5 compatibility libraries. Trying to run an old binary (RH4.2 or earlier) generates a "no such file or directory" error. To what extent does Red Hat commit to binary backward compatibility? Is it possible to get libc5-based programs, such as MATLAB, working under RH 7 without recompiling?"

a2800276 asks: "The story that XFS has gone beta raised some questions in my mind. There are now four journaling filesystems available under various OSS licenses and being actively developed for Linux, there being (in estimated order of maturity): SuSE/Namesys's reiserfs, SGI's XFS, IBM's JFS and Tweedie/Redhat's ext3fs. Avoiding the obvious question of why can't the effort going into four different projects be channeled into one, I think a discussion of the particular merits of the different fs's would be interesting."